The War Against Grammar

I've taken a bit of a detour from Russell Kirk's Roots of American Order.  I am zipping through a fantastic little book that I can't help but do a little writing about.

This book by Stanford Ph.D. Professor David Mulroy, (available here: Grammar) speaks to the importance of traditional grammar instruction in our education system.  He believes and offers convincing proofs that English teachers must revitalize grammar instruction if we are to produce a generation that can read and write complex texts.

Surprisingly, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) has made it their policy through official resolutions to not teach traditional grammar.  Though officially adopted in 1985, the issue of whether or not to teach grammar dates back to 1925 and a doctoral dissertation by Charles Fries.  His name is used frequently by the NCTE, which was founded in 1911, claims 80,000 members, and publishes thirteen separate journals. Fries layed the foundation of modern linguistics and through his book titled, The Structure of English (1952) clearly implied that traditional grammar instruction ought be discouraged.

A study conducted by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) found that adults who were educated prior to 1960 ranked very high in their ability to comprehend connected prose, but those younger adults educated after 1960 ranked much lower.  Perhaps the best evidence lies in the declining SAT scores.  According to Mulroy,

"Both verbal and quantitative scores began to sink in 1963.  The average verbal score dropped over 50 points; the quantitative scored fell from 502 to 466 in 1980.  In 1996, The College Board "recentered" the SAT scores.  The average verbal score for that year, 428, was reported as 505; the quantitative average was changed from 488 to 512.  In 2002, the recentered averages were 504 (verbal) and 516 (mathematics)."

Another indicator of a problem in language arts instruction is the percentage of students studying foreign language at the college level.  In 1965, that number was 16.5% (of college credits earned in foreign language).  In 1977 the average was 7.75% and in 1998 (the last year for which information is available) the percentage was 7.9.  Today, an awful lot of time in foreign language classes is spent on cultural activities at the expense of grammar instruction in the target language.

Grammar's Origins

Who first thought about the grammar of language, the parts of speech?  Not surprisingly, it was the Greeks.  Plato began the analysis of language with his tripartite system: nouns, verbs, and everything else.  Aristotle continued the analysis with a more complete system adding conjunctions, adverbs, and prepositions. He did not distinguish between adjectives and nouns because adjectives are often used as nouns (Home of the Free and the Brave) and nouns can be used as possessive adjectives (The rich man's wealth is his fortress, Prov. 10:15).  The definitive Grammar that was completed, published, and reached the farthest both in geography and time was a treatise by Dionysius in 100 B.C.  The Techne Grammatike is perhaps one of the most influential books ever written. Its influence reaches the grammars of modern European languages.  Hence, it was the Greeks who thought about language and defined the natural order of thinking by naming the parts of speech.

The Romans, being an inclusive culture and recognizing the wisdom of the Greeks, imitated the Greek curriculum of grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, harmony, and astronomy, naming them the artes liberales.  In the early 4th century A.D., a nine-volume work on education was written by Martianus Capella, a Roman living in Carthage.  The title of this allegorical work is De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii ("The Marriage of Philology and Mercury").  It achieved great vogue and endured as an educational classic for centuries.  It conferred a long-lasting prestige to the liberal arts, and even though today there are over a hundred graduate programs available under the title "liberal studies," most have no historical claim to it.

The Liberal Arts

The liberal arts are a direct descendant of alphabetic literacy.  By studying the ancient philosophers' writings, their statements of truths, one could discover the basic patterns of thought which are themselves what bind the seven liberal arts together.  The ancients believed these truths were hard-wired in the individual.  This was exemplified in Plato's The Meno, in which Socrates is depicted leading an uneducated slave boy to the Pythagorean Theorem through a series of questions.  This demonstrated that the rules of the subjects of the seven liberal arts are innate.  They can be drawn out of the student because they follow universal laws.

For this reason, the value of the liberal arts was never challenged (except for rhetoric because it was often misused) and they were considered the ground rules of thought.  But, they were not an end; their value was instrumental.  They made students better learners.  Seneca said  that the student should not be learning the liberal arts, but should have learned them and then moved on to more serious endeavors.

Next up, a little history of the teaching of English grammar through the ages.